


chains around my demons

by scythian_andromache



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Don't copy to another site, Dreams and Nightmares, Escaped!Quynh, Families of Choice, Found Family, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25597813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scythian_andromache/pseuds/scythian_andromache
Summary: Every night, Nile dreams of Quynh. Every night, it's the same vision, the same terrifying dream. And then one day, suddenly, it isn't.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache the Scythian & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko, Nile Freeman & Quynh | Noriko, background Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Comments: 21
Kudos: 247





	chains around my demons

**Author's Note:**

> I finally watched The Old Guard and fell in love.  
> no beta, mistakes my own

_Desperation. Rage. Insanity._

_None of it is new. She dreams of it nightly, Quynh’s last moments perpetually invading her sleep. Each time she screams, slams against her iron coffin desperately, drowns. Over and over again. Nothing new under the sun._

_None of it is new. She wakes with a gasp, the visceral fear, anger, fraying senses lingering like an acrid taste in her mouth, gripping her as her own adrenaline pumps furiously through her veins, before her body finally adjusts to her physical reality._

_None of it is new. She blinks, and she’s underwater. Blinks, and she sees Quynh’s scream, a cloud of bubbles escaping, the last air in her lungs. Blinks, and feels the bite of the metal as Quynh’s fists pound the door to the coffin. Blinks, and Quynh is still, feels the life leave her, feels her eyes roll back in her head. Blinks, and Quynh is screaming, pounding the coffin door, feeling it budge—_

_That’s new._

She wakes up, already in a sitting position as she heaves a breath. In front of her is Andy, shaking her roughly.

“Andy—” she gasps, trying to realign with reality, trying to tell her that her dream about Quynh was _different_ tonight.

“C’mon, kid. We’ve gotta go,” says Andy.

“But—”

“No buts, it’s time to move,” the other woman says, handing her a loaded Glock.

From the other room, there’s a crash, and the thud of feet, seven—no, eight—separate sets of footsteps advancing through the house.

“ _Fuck,_ ” hisses Nile, because there’s no time to put on combat boots, and this is absolutely going to hurt. She’s up in a flash, gun aimed at the doorway, and takes out one, two, as the tac-team comes storming in.

There’s a flashbang, and in her disorientation, just manages to throw herself in front of Andy as the _pop – pop – pop_ of their guns go off. (In the background, there’s the sound of measured shots from Andy’s gun, calm and deadly, and the more explosive ring of Nicky’s sniper shots.) She dies, still painful but not nearly as terrifying as the first dozen times, and eleven seconds later, feels one of the bullets push out of her skin. Coughs, and spits out another. Feels her skin knit back together for the three through-and-throughs.

“Right, time to go,” says Nicky’s voice through the haze, and Andy grips her arm and pulls her up. On the floor are eight dropped bodies, the remains of a once-elite squad.

“Copley’s going to have a field day with this one, but he deserves it,” Joe snarks.

They always have go-bags on hand, and it’s only a matter of grabbing a few things to clean out the space. Nile gets to put on shoes, this time, and then they’re out, screeching away from the carnage in Andy’s beat up Citroën. Four immortals, back in the wind.

* * *

It’s nearly forty-eight hours, five countries (six if you count Luxembourg, which none of the rest of them seem to), and three continents before Nile gets the chance to sleep again. Sure, she catches a few winks of sleep in transport, but never deep, never enough to recoup her energy. Nile, after all, is not yet used to getting the rejuvenating sleep on nose-diving cargo planes that Andy, Joe, and Nicky seem to achieve, even after six months of this life. 

Only when everything’s over, when Copley’s wiping yet more footage and the four of them are at one of Andy’s safe houses—this time in Bangkok—does Nile gets the chance to sleep again. In the interim, she died seven separate times, and frankly, dying is exhausting. She’s surprised she’s still standing. She’s out like a light, and sleeps soundly for the first time in weeks. No dreams, no visions, no dying Quynh invading her thoughts at every turn.

She awakes naturally, to the sound of clinking dishes somewhere nearby, and the alluring smell of coffee.

God, how long has it been since she’s had coffee? Four days? Five? Too long, in her estimation.

“The sleepyhead awakens,” teases Joe.

“Good morning, _bambina,_ ” greets Nicky, a cup of coffee already in a mug for her. “Yusuf, _hayati_ , she is only a baby,” he scolds gently. “They need sleep.”

Joe hums. “There are _tamr_ to break your fast and a plate of pancakes in the fridge.”

Nile blinks, and goes to retrieve the pancakes. It takes a moment for her brain to catch up and supply the fact that the dates on the table are also meant for her, if she wishes. “ _Shukran kteeran_ ,” she says, conscious of her accent as she thanks Joe; she’s been making an effort to learn more than English, high school level Spanish, and the few words of Pashto that she speaks ever since joining up with them.

“My pleasure,” says Joe fondly.

“Where’s Andy?”

“Where is she ever?” By now, Nile knows that’s code for ‘out and we don’t know where.’

“We are going to Wat Arun, later,” says Nicky. “If you’d like to join.”

Nile only vaguely knows what that is, but it would be nice to do something that doesn’t involve shooting or dying.

“Sure.”

They have a very enjoyable afternoon touring the temple—not a single bullet in sight, much to Nile’s pleasure—and Joe and Nicky tell her the story of the first time they came here, when it was being built more than four hundred years ago. Joe and Nicky narrate back and forth with the practiced ease and fluidity of people who know intrinsically how the other thinks, and their comedic timing is unparalleled. Nile finds herself laughing more than she has in weeks, and it feels _good._ For a few breathless moments, she feels weightless, like everything might just work out, despite the fact that she’s _immortal_ and the world has become infinitely more complicated for her to navigate.

As good a time as she’s having, she ducks out in the mid-afternoon, making excuses about still being tired, so that Joe and Nicky can gallivant around the city alone, instead of with a third wheel. When she gets back to the safe house, Andy is still gone, and she finds that she actually is tired. It takes very little to fall asleep again.

* * *

_Desperation. Rage. Insanity._

_Shit, this dream again._

_Wait—no, it’s the wrong flavor of each._

_Desperation, but the fiery, yearning sort of a goal not yet accomplished, not the despairing, scrabbling misery of before._

_Rage, but calm and white-hot, not the frenetic rage of a cornered animal._

_Insanity, but an ordered sort of chaos, not the entropic fraying of a mind from endless, repeated trauma._

_All of this is new. There are no bubbles, no pounding hands on unyielding iron, no screams, no death._

_Instead, there is rocky coast. The flash of a café, an umbrella filled terrace. The feel of a deep lungful of air, bright and fresh. A cool, salty breeze. An undercurrent of rippling, deep anger._

_“Oh, a baby,” says a voice, and a face comes into focus. Quynh, she realizes, slightly gaunt, but with eyes that are a thousand meters deep. She tilts her head. “_ Two _babies.” She grins, razor sharp, like a predator and—_

Nile wakes with a gasp.

The light is low, the sun set over the horizon, only the last lines of pink and orange still lingering in the sky.

Every nerve ending in her body is on fire, adrenaline pumping, because those _eyes_ , those fathomless, bottomless eyes are still imprinted in her vision.

“Andy,” she croaks.

“Calm down, kiddo, you’re all right.” Joe and Nicky must be back from their sightseeing and/or shenanigans.

She feels cold. She’s not all right.

“Booker,” she gasps, trying to convey her fear. _Two babies,_ Quynh had said. Her and Booker. Two people—new immortals—for Quynh to dream about, now that she isn’t dying every three to five minutes. 

“Traitorous—” a word falls out of Joe’s mouth that no longer exists in any living language. Nile’s not sure she could replicate its rasping consonants even if she tried, but she gets the message loud and clear.

“Quynh is alive and I think Booker’s in danger,” she says, in a rush, heart racing and eyes panicky. 

Nicky takes her hand in his. “I need you to breathe with me, Nile. Deep breaths. In, and out.” He coaches her through several cycles, until it no longer feels like her heart is going to gallop out of her chest. He says something to Joe in a language Nile doesn’t understand, and he leaves the room, presumably to do whatever it is Nicky asked of him.

“What you have gone through, seeing Quynh every night, it is something I do not wish to imagine,” says Nicky softly. “I am blessed to have met her, to not see her every time I close my eyes. I know this is difficult, but I need you to tell me everything you have seen.”

“It’s different now,” Nile says, taking another shaky breath. “Before it was just—endless drowning. Every time. But I—before everything happened, I felt the coffin door move. I was going to tell Andy but—” _We all died a couple of times and ended up here_. She falters, but Nicky seems to understand. He squeezes her hand, so casual and reassuring in his touch.

“Just now, I saw her in a town. I—I don’t know where. But it was like she was aware I was seeing her. She said _two babies,_ and the look on her face…” Nile trails off, unable to describe it. She’s not sure she’s ever felt her own fear so viscerally, not in Afghanistan, not in the cargo plane with the dead/not-dead pilot, not even at Merrister. Quynh is out for blood, and there’s something in her bones that tells her this is a primordial force to be feared.

“Quynh has been trapped for a long time,” says Joe, who has returned. “You don’t spend that long alone and in pain without it changing you.”

“We need to protect Andy,” says Nile, rationality starting to creep back in. Quynh may be a threat to them—to her or Booker—but she’s a threat to now-mortal Andy most of all.

“Protect Andy from what?” says Andy, who has reappeared as if by magic, as if the invocation of her name summoned her.

“Quynh has escaped,” says Nicky, flatly, and all of the color drains from Andy’s face.

* * *

Booker is extremely drunk. His body, dreadful regenerative thing that it is, metabolizes alcohol out of his system much faster than the average person, so he’s gone through three fifths of rum in an attempt to dull his senses.

He’s never stopped dreaming about Quynh, exactly, but the dreams which had been so dull and infrequent for so long showed up again full force after just a few weeks of exile from the rest of the group. He’s tired of it. He just wants to sleep peacefully, for a little bit.

Booker stumbles into his apartment, bleary eyed and praying that this dull feeling will last long enough for him to fall asleep. He thinks maybe he could just pass out in the kitchen when he lays his eyes on a ghost.

_Merde._

The dream has come to him apparently, and he’s unprepared. He doesn’t want to watch her drown again.

“Booker. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

It’s Quynh, very much alive and very much free.

* * *

“You can’t be serious,” snaps Nile, upon hearing Andy’s intention to find Quynh.

“I must face what I did to her,” insists Andy.

“She is out for _blood,_ Andy. Yours. You gotta play this one smart.”

Andy grips her arm, looks her dead in the eye. “You know how I left her. There is a penance to be paid.”

“Joe? Nicky?” Nile says, looking for back up, but they seem to defer to Andy’s _stupid_ choice.

The eye roll Nile gives them contains multitudes: _I can’t believe I’m doing this_ and _you’re all idiots_ and _so help me, the sheer dumbassery here is unparalleled_.

“Goddamn it,” she huffs. “Okay, fine. Here’s what I know.”

They spend the rest of the evening plotting their course back to Europe, where they’re sure to find both Booker and Quynh, maybe together or maybe not. Nile swears she’s going to protect Andy, even if she has to die a hundred more times. The other woman has grown on her, and besides, she’s one of only four—now, maybe, five—resources that Nile’s got. She can’t die permanently now.

* * *

Quynh has already blown up an old safe house of Andy’s on a bluff in the nearby Scottish highlands that she remembers from before her drowning before Booker sobers up enough to try to do something about it. (In retrospect, he should’ve just shot himself; it probably would have been a faster reset.)

He catches her sitting on a rock, watching the blaze, back resolutely to the sea. She probably never wants to see it again, and he can’t say that he blames her.

“I’m going to kill her,” Quynh promises venomously. “I’m going to kill her at least a dozen times in a row.”

“She’s not immortal anymore,” says Booker, as casually as he can.

“Even better,” Quynh spits, but he sees something flash in her eyes.

He knows that look. He’s too well acquainted with that look. It’s the fear of being left alone, like she already has been for five hundred years. (Well, he hasn’t been alone for quite that long, but sometimes it feels like it.)

“Will that sort of revenge really make you feel better, do you think?” he asks conversationally, and is rewarded with a throwing star to the chest. He drops, dies, blinks, coughs, and stands back up, the freshly expelled throwing star falling into his hands. (Ah, so it did reboot all the alcohol out of his system. At least he won’t have a hangover, for however brief a time.)

“I think it’ll feel excellent,” says Quynh, but he doesn’t believe her. Even in his misguided efforts to find the cure to their immortality, he never wanted to be the one to snuff out the life of one of his friends permanently. He’s never felt more regret than when he shot her, when he realized she wasn’t healing.

He sighs heavily. “It doesn’t feel as good as you think it will.”

“You are a _child_ ,” Quynh says dismissively, “still gumming at the teat of time. You have seen nothing.”

Booker closes his eyes, tries not to be get angry. He’s been alive half as long as she spent drowning. He hasn’t seen nothing, but Quynh is _old_. Even his two hundred years must feel like a few grains of sand in comparison to her—what, two thousand years? Three?

“If you want to be angry,” says Booker, thinking that this is the least he can do after what he did to his friends, “be angry at me. I dreamed of you drowning, and I didn’t try very hard to find you.”

Quynh narrows her eyes. “She _betrayed_ me. Have you any idea what that feels like?”

No, he’s just been on the other side of it.

“Besides,” she says. “I was already planning on killing you a few more times today. This changes nothing.”

She pulls a gun seemingly from nowhere, and puts three rounds in his chest. It takes him a little longer to regenerate, this time, and she finally gets a few moments of peace and quiet.

* * *

“That was Copley,” says Andy, ending the call. They’re at Joe and Nicky’s apartment in Paris—a proper apartment, not just a safe house like Andy’s church, the one that got practically blown to bits in the Merrick debacle. “He says there was a bombing in Scotland yesterday.”

Nile’s eyes widen, but Joe is just wearing a _get to the point_ face. Andy scowls. “It was one of mine. She’ll come for the cave next, I bet.”

“We could keep the Rodin here, in the meantime,” suggests Joe glibly, earning himself another pointed scowl from Andy, but it doesn’t faze him in the slightest. “I’m just saying that it’s a masterpiece, and we all know what Quynh is capable of. It would be a shame to lose such a work of art.”

They end up moving three _crates_ of “knickknacks” from the cave to the Paris apartment. (“What the _fuck_ ,” murmurs Nile. “Is that a _Van Gogh,_ too?” Joe happily informs her that it is, and that it’s also probably the least valuable thing in the crates. Nile is suitably horrified.)

There’s a fourth crate that doesn’t fit in the Citroën, and when they go back to the cave, they find it already occupied.

Quynh has a battle axe and a stick of dynamite; Booker is perched on the crate. He gives the smallest little wave to Nile as they walk in.

What ensues is not entirely clear to Nile, because apparently the primary language that Quynh and Andy communicate in is _not_ English. It’s entirely unsettling to not be in the loop as she listens to the two of them ping-pong back and forth, until Quynh starts yelling, at which point Joe and Nicky start yelling _too,_ and for a couple of minutes it’s utter chaos.

Maybe not understanding gives Nile an edge, though, because she’s concentrating _so hard_ that she sees Quynh’s hand twitch before anyone else, and before she even knows what she’s doing, she’s taking a flying leap to body-block Andy as three daggers come out of nowhere and meet her torso. She lands with a hard thud, and—as seems to be the norm, lately—dies.

By the time she comes back to consciousness, there are five faces staring down at her. Quynh and Andy are no longer fighting, at least for the moment. 

“There was a different poison on each dagger, so I think technically you died four times in a row,” says Booker cheerfully.

“Super,” says Nile, groaning. It certainly _feels_ like she died four times over.

“Quynh has decided that for today, she’s not going to kill Andy,” adds Nicky helpfully. “And says that she’s sorry for killing you.”

Nile narrows her eyes at Nicky.

“Maybe I’m editorializing a little,” he admits. “But the first part is true.”

Nile hauls herself into a sitting position and assesses the situation for herself. Andy’s face is ghostly pale, and she’s staring at Quynh like she’s both her nightmare and her salvation, but at least she’s alive. Booker looks vaguely amused; Nicky looks tired; Joe looks relieved. Quynh’s face is inscrutable.

“I’m Nile,” says Nile cautiously.

“Hello, second baby,” says Quynh, smiling sharply. She says something else, but she’s speaking Middle English, which is almost unintelligible to Nile. Five hundred years drowning really puts a damper on language learning, it seems.

“Excellent, introductions are out of the way,” says Nicky, crisply, cutting off any scathing reply Nile might have. “Can we go eat something now? If another argument is going to break out, it’s probably best we all have full stomachs.”

“And we’re going to trust her. Just like that.” Nile’s voice is flat. “Five minutes ago you were all arguing and then she killed me and now she’s okay.”

Joe shrugs, soft and elegant. “Someday you’ll understand,” he says, and it irks her, the insinuation that she’s a child and not the fully grown adult she’s had to be since the age of sixteen. 

Maybe in a thousand years she _will_ understand, but it still seems unfathomable to her now.

Nile heaves a long-suffering sigh. They theoretically know what they’re doing. What’s one more ridiculous decision in the grand scheme of things, right?

Maybe the six of them will beat the odds, and figure things out together. Crazier things have happened. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading and indulging me in the little corner of the fandom sandbox I've created! I absolutely loved the movie and wrote this in a fever dream right away after watching, and I have so many headcanons for the characters, now. :)  
> (Like most authors, comments/kudos always appreciated!)


End file.
